Is Perl missing a trick with regard to this programming approach?

Well, CPAN might be missing a trick, but Perl's alive and well at my company, where I wrote a module called JobQueue that can either run jobs locally (via a fork/wait sub-module called ForkingLayer) or remotely (via calls to a grid engine that we have here, in a sub-module called GridEngine).

My module's been in Production for 2-3 years and works really well -- I took advantage of Perl's OO structure and set it up so that the application doesn't have to know whether it's running on the grid engine or locally. Jobs get submitted, and eventually they finish. That's all the application has to know.